Thailand: Standing in neither camp: the coup a year on

Standing in neither camp
Michael Connors

A year after the September 2006 coup d’etat debate still rages on whether the anti-Thaksin movement is in part responsible for inviting the military to stage a coup. A quite legitimate but difficult question is being asked of those who opposed Thaksin for his undemocratic, or at least illiberal politics, and for his abuse of power: why not level your charges elsewhere (?), meaning most obviously the palace and those surrounding it. This is a bold challenge.

For several years there has been a steady advance in critical writings on the palace, both in English and in Thai. The Thai material is especially brave, for it courts royal-nationalist hysteria and legal sanction. It doesn’t matter that in December 2005 the king said he can do wrong and that he welcomes criticism (interesting to see how that defence would work out in a court of law), lèse majesté law remains on the books. Moreover, the yellow-shirt mentality is merely a surface expression of something deeply rooted. This might partly explain the muted response to the challenge.

There may of course be other reasons, including a genuine belief that for all its faults the monarchical institution has indeed played the safety valve role attributed to it, being the ‘Supreme Ombudsman” as various people have described the monarchy. Some in Thailand are seeking, mistakenly in my opinion, to embed liberal forms of rule by deploying the monarchy in a manner that reads it as the original liberal institution. I have taken up this issue elsewhere, arguing that this represents an elite liberal reading of the monarchy and involves substantial mythicising.

The monarchy in Thailand is a constitutional monarchy with special powers; anyone who imagines that Walter Bagehot has said all there is to say about its functioning ("the right to be consulted, the right to advise, and the right to warn”) is missing the extraordinary conventional powers that have accrued to the institution, a product of both design and historical evolution. Neither the design nor the evolution would have occurred without a particular constellation of forces, including the demobilisation of radical forces in the 1970s, in which the monarchy played a key role, and the continuing elevation of the institution into the metaphoric soul of the nation.

To recognise and analyse the role of the monarchy in Thai politics is not to endorse that role. It is, however, to appreciate how the balance of forces in Thailand are constituted beyond normative appeals to ‘democracy.’ The monarchy and the military are enduring historical institutions in Thailand. Deeply rooted in various networks, ideologically and culturally embedded, and organizationally present. These are powerful institutions, as former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra learned. While some are now trying to script Thaksin as a bourgeois revolutionary he was always too poorly equipped and lacking in vision to play that role. Thaksin played an insider’s game and lost. Many supporters want to paint him as a democratic martyr; his actions suggest a terrible authoritarian in the making. Any legitimacy he may have had as a consequence of being selected prime minister by elected representatives was negated by his actions in that position.

Does Thaksin’s authoritarianism justify a more insidious authoritarianism in the form of the military coup? No. Other channels were available to restrain or fell Thaksin: further popular protest, the weakening of his parliamentary dominance, the use of legal measures. The military intervened, pre-empting these possibilities, to remind all that behind the flow of contested politics a ‘state of exception’ always lurks. The instrument of that state of exception, the military, bluntly and arrogantly inserted its own solution, showing up the fiction that lies behind people-sovereignty.

Somsak Jeamteerasakul has noted that some who would normally be identified as progressive activists or democrats feel indifferent to Thaksin’s fall and feel no outrage at the military’s actions. I was against the coup, but I can not claim to have felt especially angry. At that time my opinion was that Thaksin was worse than the military – a coup d’etat, the construction of national security complexes and human rights abuses are to be expected from a military steeped in the kind of history the Thai military has. The military was living its soul. And of course it continues to do so , pressing for national security laws and the continued imposition of martial law, thereby illustrating that some of its claimed reasons for the coup to have been excuses or self-delusional. Certainly, the military, at least sections of it, as the instrument of force for national unity was concerned about disunity and apparent slights on the monarchy; but its stated concerns for the health of Thailand’s democracy and the level of corruption have purchase only if we suspend good judgement. The military did in 2006, and does now, what the military can be expected to do.

Thaksin was worse because one might have expected better from the first prime minister elected under the reform constitution. As an elected politician Thaksin de-instutionalised the political system (protected by his hegemonically constructed majoritarianism), aggrandised wealth and power, engaged in intimidation of those against him, and recklessly and with fatal consequences abandoned the rule of law in the war on drugs, thus negating the social compromise effected in the 1997 constitution – however flawed that constitution was. To those who scoff the rule of law as a bourgeois abstraction, consider it from the perspective of those who never had a chance to plead “not guilty” during the wave of extra judicial killings in 2003.

What is implied, but never stated, by those who see a direct line of causality between the anti-Thaksin camp and the coup is that progressive forces should have endured the Thaksin era because it was a popularly elected regime. This is a retrospective argument, made in the light of the coup. So too is the argument that organizing opposition against Thaksin laid the basis for a conservative military backlash. This is a retro-subjectivist view of history, putting hindsight at the steering wheel. It is to say that history is made by will, intent and prudent choices. In part maybe, but not wholly.

The anti-Thaksin movement was a legitimate movement, and like all movements it attracted attention from forces with other agendas and interests who sought to manipulate it for other purposes. By the time that movement was demobilised as a consequence of its misconceived and politically opportunist dependence on Article 7 in April 2006, the game moved to the elite sphere. Social forces on the ground were not sufficiently organized to determine the political outcome. In that context the “no to the two camps” (สองไม่เอา) position makes sense. It opposes the coup and forces arrayed behind it and it equally opposes the deepening authoritarianism represented by Thaksin.

I happen to believe that wellbeing and social justice, democratic socialism, are secured by deepening both the democratic and liberal gains of historical struggle – something neither Thaksin, the monarchy nor the military have intended to do.

Thailand and the United States

Thailand and the United States of America: Beyond Hegemony?
Draft of article that appears in Bush and Asia, edited by Mark Beeson, Routledge, London 2006
Michael K. Connors
Introduction
This paper explores US-Thai relations in the context of a rapidly shifting global and regional landscape since the end of the Cold War. The days when US Cold War objectives twinned with a militarised Thai state are well over. Bereft of this unifying theme, any analysis of the Thai–US relationship immediately confronts a range of seemingly contradictory phenomena. In the last several years, for example, Thailand has been declared a major non-NATO ally at the very time that it has been coy about support for US strategy in the Middle East. The Thai government initially opposed the war in Iraq, but Thailand was the first Asian nation to send troops to Iraq as part of a ‘post conflict’ humanitarian mission. Having earlier announced that US forces would not use Thai airbases for transit to Iraq, the government cited treaty obligations to explain subsequent US access. Confronted with these inconsistencies, it is easy to see the attraction of the popular metaphoric phrase ‘bending with the wind’, which originated in the 19th Century to describe Siam’s adaptation to evolving structures of imperial power. In the current period, a more appropriate phrase might be ‘bending US hegemony’, suggesting that Thailand has not simply glided hither and thither according to prevailing winds. Rather, it has closely associated itself with the US, while obviously seeking to pursue its own elite defined ‘national’ interests.

If we understand hegemony in the manner proposed by Antonio Gramsci (1972), we are interested in the problematic of how a ruling strata is able to integrate subordinate elements into a hierarchical order on a seemingly consensual basis. Robert Cox (1987, 7) extends this problematic to the international level arguing that “the dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent, functioning according to general principles that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading state or states and leading social classes but at the same time offer some measure or prospect of satisfaction to the less powerful.” Neo-Gramscian perspectives move beyond the territorial state as the articulator of hegemony, developing analyses of the role of transnational capitalist classes, and their impact on the nature of trading and investment regimes, and on the functioning of international financial institutions. For his part, Cox (1997, 60) has recognised the growing power of what he terms the ‘nebuleuse’: “a loose elite network of influentials and agencies, sharing a common set of ideas that collectively perform the [international] governance function.” These include the World Bank, the IMF, the WEF, the OECD, the ADB and so on. By virtue of the structure of the global economy and US dominance, and the presence of the world’s major TNCs there, sections of the US state are powerful within these agencies. These considerations are relevant to the status of inter-elite Thai-US relations.

In the Gramscian perspective hegemony, does not principally entail direct forms of domination under duress, nor does it indicate identical interests. The constitution of hegemony requires that over a range of crucial areas of interstate and international life (security, trade, sometimes regime form), metropolitan and peripheral elites share broad understanding of economic and security matters, and move towards similar objectives. Such understandings are mediated by the prevailing structures of economy and security, projects for change, patterns of socialization, and by the constitution of forces within territorial states and in transnational spheres. For the most part, Thai peripheral elites have contended and cooperated in an international order structured by US hegemony. While accepting US leadership over the last half century, there have been disagreements and significant divergences in particular arenas. Divergence does not necessarily entail the end of hegemony, a threshold needs to be reached where matters of substantive difference over crucial arenas outweigh matters of agreement and compliance. The Thai state has rarely strayed from a broad subaltern position vis-à-vis the US and the nebuleuse: this is despite countervailing pressures emanating from its regional environment, and apparent Thai doubts over the 2002 US National Security Strategy. The hegemonic relationship is also sustained by the partly deterritorialised nature of the nebuleuse, which allows some elements of the internationalised Thai elite to benefit by entering its ranks and assuming a hegemonic role (a Thai national and former Finance Minister currently heads the WTO). While many economic sectors remain nationally based, the rise of international and transnational elite spheres blurs the line between metropole and periphery.

The Thai relationship to US hegemony is historically fluid, with material, security and political elements of the relationship differing over time. This paper explores some of the characteristics of this fluidity. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, US-Thai state elites shared strong affinities across all three elements. Between the late 1970s and 1980s these affinities weakened, although they were sufficiently robust to survive Thailand’s drift into regionalism. In the 1990s the Thai state underwent a significant process of economic and political liberalization. This reflected the emerge of new domestic forces, and an increasingly transnational Thai-based nebuleuse. In tune with the US concerns to press for democratic enlargement in the post cold war era, the two states moved closer together. In the current period, commencing in 2001 with the arrival of the Bush and Thaksin administrations, the hegemonic relationship has taken on a new form, with security and resource imperatives compelling the US to extend its relationship with a Thai state that remains uneasy about US global strategy. Furthermore, the democratic convergence of the 1990s has receded, with Thailand moving towards authoritarian forms of rule. The hegemonic relationship has become strained. The rest of this chapter explores these different periods, with the spotlight on more recent times.

Read the full draft here http://www.latrobe.edu.au/socsci/staff/connors/connors-Thai-US.doc

Juvenelia: Australia and the United States

The Imperative Grammar: Australia and the United States
Michael Connors


During the Sydney APEC Summit in early September the Howard administration and Bush administrations inked the Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, deepening Australia’s access to US military technology and contractual rights. The agreement underscores the intensifying nature of the US-Australia alliance. For some Australian nationalists the agreement is further evidence of Australia’s lapdog approach to foreign policy; a sign of dependence and its prolonged adolescence on the world stage.

Don Watson’s 2001 Quarterly Essay Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America captures this mood in its suggestion that Australia should petition the United States to become the 51st state of the Union; “The United States will get a state instead of a colony and Australians wouldn’t have to go on pretending our souls are our own.” Watson falls into the camp that laments, for having laid to rest the pursuit of Australia’s own ends, Australia’s endless quest for great and powerful friends.

The key instrument in Australia’s permanent infantilisation is held to be the 1951 ANZUS treaty. As New Zealand’s role in ANZUS treaty is currently redundant, the treaty effectively defines the terms of the US-Australia bilateral alliance. Until its invocation after the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001, the treaty was an umbrella under which hundreds of more concrete agreements worked, including intelligence sharing and the terms of military exercises.

Approaching the question from a different angle, assuming that Australian foreign policy elites are ruthlessly pragmatic and far-thinking, is it not possible to think of the alliance as indeed serving particular state-defined national interests? Furthermore, is it not possible to reverse the typical image of dependency and move to an image of the tail wagging the dog – at least on occasion: sometimes Australia’s aspired benefit comes at a cost to the United States.

Ambrose Bierce in his 19th century Devil’s Dictionary defined an alliance as: “In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.”


Bierce’s wit is a suggestive starting point to undo the dependency thesis and begin to unravel what interests are served through the alliance. What does Australia get from the alliance?

In its important foreign policy statement Advancing the National Interest (2003) the Howard government states:

The depth of security, economic and political ties that we have with the United States makes this a vital relationship. No other country can match the United States' global reach in international affairs…Further strengthening Australia's ability to influence and work with the United States is essential for advancing our national interests.
(Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2003)


And speaking in 2001 Howard claims that

The ANZUS pact between Australia and the United States has done more to deliver the security of the Australian nation in the years that have gone by since World War II than any other international arrangement.

The first quotation is unremarkable: Australia’s government seeks to align itself with the hegemonic superpower. Access to that power, by support of that power, is seen as advancing the wellbeing of Australian security. The second quotation is remarkable, indicating that the government’s skepticism of the collective security arrangements and an emerging international order based on the efforts of the United Nations goes so far as to discount anything but the US as the key to global order.

Despite the brief dalliance of the Labor years (1983-1996) with middle-power diplomacy – the idea that middle powers require the comforting structure of international rules and regulations as a safeguard against the capricious nature of an international system dominated by great powers – Australian governments have largely responded to security questions using the grammar of the US alliance, often intuitively.

Policy and intellectual communities surrounding the government are keyed into the grammar. In a 2003 Melbourne Asia Policy Paper Paul Dibbs, one time architect of Australia’s security policy, declares that any dispassionate analysis would confirm the indispensability of the alliance, which he holds to be self evident. In 2004 ANU Professor Hugh White, agonizing over the Iraq war, and thinking with the grammar of the alliance, ludicrously confirmed the unprincipled nature of alliance logic when he admitted the possibility that sometimes going to war for the sake of maintaining an alliance can be a wise decision:

…And what of the first policy judgment: that we needed to support the invasion to protect our alliance with the US? This is a respectable argument. It sometimes makes sense to go to war to support an ally if you expect them to support you when your turn comes. It would have been unwise to say no to Washington about Iraq. But we did not need to rush to say yes either.


For some leading academics of international relations, Mr Howard is a "prescient political seer, (in) position to extract substantial and enduring benefits from the ANZUS affiliation including the culmination of a wide-ranging bilateral Australia US free trade agreement."

None of these views, including those of the government, indicate servile and wretched lapdoggery in the face of a great and powerful friend. All of them indicate a rather calculated approach to the alliance, even going so far as to speak of extracting benefits that might well be seen as costly to the superior partner in the alliance.

The Australian state and its ruling elites are not victims of dependency, but beneficiaries of an alliance system that secures a global hierarchy of states and economies in which Australia sits comfortably. Australia is a partner in what has been described as a system of global apartheid, where access to the goods that deliver wellbeing are skewed heavily in favour of advanced capitalist economies.


The alliance does not tie Australia into slavish dependence: in fact Australia has significant strategic independence. That the Australian government may appear to lack this simply reflects a convergence of interest. It is arguable that the Howard Government’s 1997 foreign policy paper, In the National Interest actually anticipates the hard-nosed disavowal of the United Nations by the Bush administration.

Rather than following the US into Iraq, the Howard government saw such action as the consummation of its own security outlook, or more specifically as a means to advance that outlook. This is to suggest that the alliance is not just about poor choices or misguided policy; there are structural features of Australia’s place in the world that compel it to bandwagon with the US, and sometimes to be a step ahead.

If there is to be substantive and enduring change in foreign policy, there needs to be a fundamental and substantive change in the grammar of Australian society, economics and politics. Without such changes Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States will always be an active/reactive one within a space that takes as given the global hierarchy and Australia’s rightful place in it.

Slightly different version of the piece appears on New Matilda. (newmatilda.com) 14th
November, 2007.

How Terrorism Experts Get it Wrong

Excerpted from “War on Error and the Southern Fire: How Terrorism Experts Get it Wrong” in Critical Asian Studies, 2006
Michael Connors

Citations in the original.

…Terrorism studies has its origins in studies of violence in the Middle East and in
Western Europe. In decline during the 1990s, the sub-discipline found new impetus
after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States. What does terrorism
studies offer? Over a decade ago, Mike Smith noted that twenty years of
terrorism studies had failed to generate much genuine insight into the dynamics
of local conflicts. The literature tended toward high-level generalizations
around tactical modality and causality that emerged from superficial comparative
analysis of incommensurable conflicts (for example, the IRA and the Red
Army Faction in West Germany).10 Smith asked: “So who are the experts on terrorism?
Answer, there are no experts, just people who know a little about a lot of
small conflicts.”11 This insight is significant, for it implies that so-called experts
on terrorism have little to offer relative to conflicts they are unfamiliar with.12 As
will be shown, [Rohan Gunaratna’s] Conflict and Terrorism is a good example of Smith’s thesis: forall its pretense about being an up-to-date manual on the violence in South Thailand, the book was produced by authors who seemingly know little about Thailand,
but who are equipped with the language of terrorism studies.

Burnett and Whyte, in their more recent review of terrorism studies, or
“terrorology,” note that during the 1990s a complex interaction of government-
sponsored research programs, think tanks, and academics produced a
discourse on “new terrorism” that informs post-9/11 commentary. The “new
terrorism” (hereafter without quotation marks) thesis claimed to be about a terrorism
that dispensed with traditional structures of hierarchy and command,
that was prone to use weapons of mass destruction, that was indiscriminate in
its targets, and that was pathological and beyond rational engagement.13 Such
ideas have informed much of the contemporary writing on terrorism, leading to
a politicized academic literature siding with the U.S.-driven “war on terror”
(hereafter without quotation marks). Conflict and Terrorism shares some of
these traits, although its conclusion that Thailand remains as yet a localized
struggle allows it to escape from an overzealous application of the new terrorism
thesis. Nevertheless, it is the shadow of the threat of new terrorism that
lurks behind the book’s examination of international linkages, and explains
why the book will interest terrorism analysts (59–68).14

Something also needs to be said about the current context in which writings
on terrorism are produced. This is a period in which terrorism analysts operate
in a tense civilizational, geopolitical, and ideological context that inevitably colors
their output. Even if Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis is
pure ideological and ethnocentric fury, it has captured the disposition of some
terrorism analysts who can but view Islam with suspicion; this is so for the authors
of Conflict and Terrorism (104). It is also noteworthy that the securitization
of U.S. foreign policy, whereby economic liberalization policies have been
trumped by pressure to conform to U.S. security policies, has led to greater
claims on U.S. allies in the so-called war on terror, leading to a global retreat
from human rights and democracy.15 In the West this has meant highly politicized
news reporting, often quoting academics sympathetic to the war on terror.

These reports typically conflate local conflicts with “terrorism” and downplay
human rights abuses. Conflict and Terrorism does raise some concerns
about excessive use of force in Thailand, but it tends to see the state as being
forced into repressive measures as a result of terrorist strategy (see discussion
below on Tak Bai). Furthermore, the intensification of relations between intelligence
agencies and universities provides an opportunity for some analysts to
conform to state policies and agendas and to downplay issues of “state terror.”16
It is true that many terrorism analysts are legitimately concerned with the root
local causes and trigger factors for acts of terrorism, and attempt broad-based
analyses that run counter to state interests. Such work shows up the shallow nature
of some media and academic commentary.17 But the pressure to follow
state interests and the rewards this subservience brings have increased in the
post-9/11 environment, increasing the number of opportunists in the field.18
This politicized environment has lowered the bar on the standards of analysis
and research for some terrorism analysts.

For the well-connected terrorism analyst, research extends to connections
with intelligence agencies and access to secret documents—selectively offered,
of course. Often welcomed into the corridors of power, s/he is the civilian face
of networks of intelligence that have their own agendas to advance. The politically
significant function of such opportunists, who identify or work closely
with governments, is to take the conclusions of intelligence agencies into the
public sphere in modified form, and lend such conclusions legitimacy by virtue
of being an apparently independent mouthpiece.19 Backed with megabucks for
research, sought out by police commissioners and security ministers, and
courted by media, such analysts feel free to comment on any act of terror anywhere,
anytime. This commentary-promiscuity is why they so often get it wrong.

Howard, a retiring man

Howard, a retiring man; Rudd, the class A jerk

Having done his utmost best, with his party’s backing, to turn the electoral cycle of Australian politics into a presidential-style circus of idiocy focused on the populist imagery of ‘everyman’ (for it remains everyman), John Howard’s latest spin (12th September on the 7.30 Report) that leadership is a team thing and ‘that’s a good thing’ marks the end of the politician as we know him.

It appears Howard has been trumped by all-style no-substance Ruddy-good two shoes. Rudd has mastered the presidential game with fervour. Even Rudd’s naughty escapades at a US strip club played in his favour; recasting him as the favoured son of the church to be redeemed. Cast a vote so he can still go to heaven.

Rudd, the man who believes he can smile with his faith, played class jerk at APEC and won them over with his impressive Mandarin. There is much to be said about this; for Rudd stands at the historical conjunction of Australia’s two-timing poise between the US and its client, the Japanese state, and the mightily rising Chinese behemoth.

When Rudd visited La Trobe University in 2005, as then shadow spokesperson on foreign affairs, I asked him at a public lecture what his stance would be regarding Chinese human rights if Labor won office. His response surprised me; he was upset by my criticism that Labor has always been willing to put national interest well above human rights considerations. His response reflected the luxury of the opposition benches, and also the presence of a dim part of the brain that represses memory of East Timor.

Yet, it’s hard to see how a Labor government under Rudd will deviate from the Howard government’s closed door private dialogues on human rights with China.

When the feudalistic and beatific Dalai Lama visited Australia in June, Rudd showed great sensitivity only agreeing to meet with the eminent Presence of the Buddha in Compassion, after Howard intimated he might do so. Presidentialism is also followerism.

Howard’s presidentialism stumped the Labor Party’s committee people: they could not contemplate as leader the articulate Julia Gillard, so they went through a range of potentials such as Crean-Latham-Beazley, succeeding only in proving the law of diminishing returns. Rudd rode to the leadership on a wave of desperation. He is desperation’s destiny.

Howard’s recent declaration of playing with the team holds promise for a more substantive politics, one focused on big questions as opposed to hair-style and grandfatherly comforting and giving succour to religious congregations. At last, I have found something on which I can agree with Howard. Yeah, sure.